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Review

Another year, another Mike Leigh gem, this
one called Another Year, a minor-key ensemble drama: four
seasons in the life of an aging couple—Tom, a geologist, and Gerri, a
medical counselor—played by those wonderful Leigh veterans Jim Broadbent
and Ruth Sheen. They are true Earth People, first seen tending to their
vegetable garden a short distance from their suburban London house,
comfy together with their graying hair and thickening waists. Their home
is roomy and inviting, a place of refuge for lonely people, among them
their good-hearted, thirtyish son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), and Tom’s old
friend Ken (Peter Wight), who’s in appalling physical shape and getting
fatter and more sadly soused by the day. The film’s most epic lost soul
is Mary (Lesley Manville), an alcoholic with teased hair and plunging
blouses and a desperate eye for a suitable man who will have her—even,
at one point, Tom’s broken-down, barely verbal, newly widowed brother
(David Bradley).

Leigh fans will be in clover amid all
this garrulous despair and grotesquerie. For others, Another Year
will test the paradox of Leigh’s work. It’s well known that he presents
his actors with characters and a premise rather than a finished script
and sends them out to amass details, physical and psychological. When
they return with their bounty, he shapes a screenplay and films them
indulgently. The more prodigious their misery, the more indulgent he is.
The problem is that most viewers spend less time marveling at the
actors’ inventiveness than being crushed by the weight of the
characters’ suicide-worthy lives. It’s particularly true here: Leigh has
given Manville, a frequent collaborator, a monumental pedestal, which
means that every admiring close-up of her builds to some cringe-worthy
humiliation.

My advice: Steel yourself against the
too-muchness, and savor, as if you were a social scientist, the variety
of ways in which middle-class English people create edifices in which to
house their aloneness. Leigh opens in the office of Gerri’s colleague
(Michelle Austin) with a close-up of Imelda Staunton as a woman so
utterly depressed and shut down that every scene that follows feels
escapist in comparison. (Asked what would improve her life, she murmurs,
barely audibly, “Different life …”) With their shared lot, Tom and
Gerri are exemplary—and yet their happiness has an aspect of
complacency. They know they’ve got this human-isolation thing licked and
view Mary and her ilk with a mix of sympathy and condescension: the
poor dear. But it’s better to be them than others, which means the
lesson of Another Year is: Get busy on that garden.
— David Edelstein